Secrecy Doesn’t Seem to Be the Answer

The missives come week after week, by letter, phone and e-mail . . . appeals for help, rants of pain, horror stories of inefficiency or outright evil perpetrated by an uncaring, incompetent bureaucracy.

There’s the elderly woman who took in her grandson because his father went to prison and his mother was on drugs.

“Then the county took him, said my place was too small,” she tells me, sobbing. “They put my baby up for adoption, sent him to live with strangers. They won’t tell me where, won’t even let him call his grandmaw.”

The Orange County woman who says her three small children were “ripped from my arms” and placed in foster homes after a teacher accused her of spanking her eldest too hard.

“It took my husband and me two months . . . to get them back,” she said. “And even now, they’re so scared, they cry whenever we leave them.”

And the single mother who says she lost custody of her 10-year-old after she challenged a social worker, who deemed her unfit because she let the child stay home alone for two hours each day after school.

Dutifully, I try to check out their stories, to sort out truth from the allegations, to figure out if the culprit is familial neglect or abuse or a system’s blind arrogance.

But lips are sealed, records off-limits, findings private, courtroom doors closed.

“These cases are confidential,” I’m told again and again, by officials of Children and Family Services departments.

“I wish I could tell you,” one social worker says, folding her hands atop a family’s file, as if in prayer. She looks up at me wearily. “There is so much . . . I wish you people could know.”

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It’s an anomaly in this era of public airing of private pain, this shroud of secrecy that girds the workings of the state’s juvenile dependency courts, where the fate of thousands of families is decided each day.

Historically, privacy rules have existed to protect troubled families from prying eyes. But concern is growing that the provisions also hide flaws in a system that has developed its own legacy of trouble.

That curtain of privacy could soon fall away, under a bill being considered by the state Legislature that would open to the public the courts that oversee the welfare of California’s abused and neglected children.

The bill (SB 1391) would keep dependency case records confidential but would allow--in the absence of an objection from the child--the public and the news media to attend the court hearings that accompany each step in a family’s journey toward dissolution or reconciliation.

The measure, sponsored by state Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), is supported by an array of children’s advocates, social service agencies, lawyers and judges, including the presiding judge of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, who has concluded that it balances the public’s right to know with the children’s privacy needs.

But the professional organization representing the state’s social workers is lobbying against it, saying it would allow our societal obsession with voyeurism to victimize vulnerable families during their most difficult times.

“Our primary concern is that it could harm children and their families,” says Stacie Hiramoto, lobbyist for the National Assn. of Social Workers.

“Letting the press, or nosy neighbors, just walk into a courtroom where we’re trying to determine what problems there are, trying to mend troubled families . . . I don’t see how that does anything but add to the stigma and pain these children already feel.”

Hiramoto and other opponents of the measure fear it would open the floodgates to sensationalistic coverage, turning intimate family problems into fodder for the tabloids and sweeps-week TV.

But in the handful of states that have opened their courts to the public--including New York, Minnesota, Michigan and Florida--little has changed in the way of press coverage. Our “biggest disappointment,” one Minnesota official said, “is that . . . there seems to be very little interest.”

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Maybe there is little real interest in court cases like these. Maybe, as one Orange County official told Times reporter Tracy Weber during her yearlong investigation of that county’s child welfare system, “it’s kind of like garbage collecting. People want their garbage picked up, but they don’t want to know how it’s done or what happens to it after it’s gone.”

And so the public hears only when something goes terribly, scandalously wrong in this process that we rely on to protect our children. A child is returned to a father who tortures and beats him. A foster mother burns a baby to death in a scalding hot tub.

Then fingers are pointed, reports are written, problems are pronounced resolved . . . while the state’s 100,000 foster children wage their private battles with demons and thousands more families continue to unravel in darkness.

“Anyone who has been in that system knows it could use scrutiny,” says attorney Dawn Kusumoto, who once worked as a legal advocate for abused children and is now counsel for the state Senate’s Select Committee on Juvenile Justice, which is in the process of amending Schiff’s bill to address some social worker concerns.

During her stint as an advocate, Kusumoto saw mistakes that demonized parents, traumatized children, fed a system’s need for expediency, while denying worthy families of justice.

“I saw a 10% error rate in my 500 cases . . . mostly children who were taken from their parents and shouldn’t have been. And among those kids, anywhere from 33% on up had their cases mishandled once they were removed from their homes.

“I’m not saying there are not great social workers out there, because there are. They do a very valuable and difficult job, and most of the time they do it well.”

But caseloads are so high, social workers are forced to handle three times as many cases as they should. And judges often have just minutes to decide whether children should go home with their parents or be sent to foster homes.

“In a system that is this overloaded, people are going to make mistakes,” Kusumoto says. “And any one of these mistakes can traumatize a child.

“So if the state is going to step in and act as a parent, let’s open the doors and shine a light, so we can tell how well we’re doing the job.”

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Sandy Banks can be reached at sandy.banks@latimes.com.